


Camera Lens Eyes

by grossferatu



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Aggressive Cuddles, Alternate Eyepocalypse, Angst, Apocalypse, Archive Jonathan Sims, Avatars (The Magnus Archives) - Freeform, Blow Jobs, Detective Basira Hussain, Disabilities, Elias Bouchard Wins, Everyone Is Alive, Everyone is Trans, F/F, F/M, Hunters, Hurt, I was surprisingly right in some ways, Identity Issues, Implied Rough Sex, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Martin Blackwood Needs A Nap, Monster Jonathan Sims, Multi, Napping, Post-Season/Series 04, So does everyone else, Spoiler alert: Peter gets tentacles, Statements, The Eye (The Magnus Archives) - Freeform, The Hunt (The Magnus Archives) - Freeform, Time Shenanigans, Too many eyes, for a fic with the explicit intention of "what wouldn't Jonny do", in my opinion, written before S5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-01-22 18:56:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21306941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grossferatu/pseuds/grossferatu
Summary: What does it mean to belovedby the Archive at the end of the world?Martin knows.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonathan Sims/Julia Montauk/Trevor Herbert/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Julia Montauk/Trevor Herbert/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, The Archive/Martin Blackwood, The Archivist/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 76
Kudos: 420





	1. Awaken, Ceaseless Watcher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prim_the_Amazing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/gifts).
  * Inspired by [rotten luck](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21283694) by [Prim_the_Amazing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing). 

“Jon? Jon?”

Martin was worried. Jon had made a noise that could have been laughter if it hadn’t sounded like it was being dragged out of his mouth like hair through a drainpipe. Martin had treasured that sound, once, or at least the idea of it. In the Lonely, scared days working with Peter, he had wondered if he’d ever hear it again.

Now, he wished he was hearing any other sound. Even tears would have been easier.

It was almost a relief when Jon passed out.

-

Martin waited, ignoring his need to pee and his hunger. The sky was wrong, now, and there were monsters outside, but nothing could get in. He was certain of that, though whether it was from his time with the Lonely or his time with the Eye he couldn’t say. He wasn’t as touched by the Fears as Jon was, but he was strong. He had found that out the hard way.

Reading the statement made his thoughts grow cold and strange for a long moment. He had brought these statements; if he had stayed Alone…

Martin shook off those thoughts. He was here, now, and he had to wait for Jon to wake up. He had gotten very good at doing that.

-

_Martin._

It was Jon’s voice in his head, but the Archivist’s lips did not move.

“Jon—” Martin began, startled.

Jon sat up, although it looked almost as if something else were pulling his body, like strings around the torso and arms of a collapsed marionette.

_The archive holds the knowledge of the sky. _

“Jon,” Martin tried again, nervously. “You need to rest; it’s been a very trying day. It’s not your fault, you—”

He stopped. Words in that moment seemed unnecessary as he was abruptly hit with the intimate knowledge that Jonathan Sims had retreated so far within himself that he might as well no longer inhabit his body. In front of him was not Jonathan Sims, Archivist. Not really. What stood before him, eyes the hollow color of corruption scars, was the Archive of Fear.

Its movements as it made its way towards Martin were fluid, but again Martin was reminded of strings pulled by unseen hands.

_Will you work?_

Martin stared at it. He meant to think of it as he but could not. Something about how it looked at him made him _know_ that had there been a pronoun in English that no person ever used, that would have been the appropriate one. “Work?”

_The archive liked the world. The archive kept the knowledge, kept it secret, kept it safe. The knowledge is outside the archive, now. _Its eyes were huge. _The books have escaped the library. _

This seemed to be the closest way for it to say that it did not like what was going on. Abruptly, it touched Martin’s cheek. Its hands were cold, colder than Jon’s had ever been.

_I will keep you secret, keep you safe. _

“J—you don’t need to do that,” Martin whispered, a sudden wave of misery crashing over him. This was exactly what Jon had been hoping to avoid for a long time, and here he—it was, staring at Martin with the unblinking gaze of its god.

_You are… _

Its mental voice seemed to stutter, and its eyes closed like camera lenses collapsing in on themselves.

_You are important. _

Martin didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. He didn’t know (and it took effort not to capitalize that word, even in thought) what the archive Knew about him, but he had the feeling that now wasn’t the time for his chest to bloom with warmth.

_You must find the others_.

It opened its eyes again, worrying at its lower lip with its teeth. The very-human motion was incongruous enough that Martin felt like he wanted to laugh, or maybe cry, but he carefully did neither of those things. He had the feeling that repressing his reactions was going to become a theme.

_You must find the others. But I will keep you safe. _

It took its hands off his face and grabbed his wrist.

“Now?” Martin asked, finding himself falling back into outrage. That was definitely an easier emotion than any of the others he had just felt. He had just realized that the man he loved had been forced to summon everything terrible and awful from beyond the world, and now that man was no longer—

He cut that thought off and let himself be dragged to the door. Down that mental thread lay the sickly realization that he perhaps found _it_ just as attractive as he had Jon. “Jon,” he started, unthinkingly, struggling to break its grip.

_No._

Pain bloomed behind Martin’s eyes. The archive, it seemed, found being called by that name viscerally unpleasant, and was more than willing to share that pain with Martin.

Instead of words, what filled Martin’s head was the jumbled feeling that _it was too broken, too used by other forces_ to be human. The archive could not be Jonathan Sims, not if it did not wish to spend its days scream-crying in perpetual agony.

Martin bit down on the urge to say _Jon_ again. That would only hurt it.

“Where are we going?”

_Daisy. She must be safe. She is not the center, but she is important. _

“The center?”

It turned for just a moment to look at him with that same unerring camera lens gaze.

_You are the center._

Martin staggered for a moment. It stared at him impassively, as though it hadn’t just made another strange declaration of affection so soon after the first.

“Do you know where she is?”

_Yes. This mistake must be fixed. Follow. You will be safe._

It blinked slowly.

_Perhaps bring a large stick. _

Martin let out a startled laugh. “Do you think that will help?”

He had seen the monsters outside. If he listened more closely than he wanted to, he could hear distant screaming and impossible footsteps.

It nodded.

_Not for them. For her_.

“Right.”

What was Daisy, now?

Martin wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.


	2. Hunter Hunter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy Tonner is different.

The creature of flesh that tried to hurt them shied away from its gaze. Good, it thought. There was at least one benefit to its monstrosity, and that was that it could finally keep its center safe.

It wasn’t sure if Martin understood. It decided it would make him understand as they walked down the center of the street, ignoring the cars, the sky that poured everything into its mind.

_The center of the labyrinth is the most precious thing_.

This made Martin frown. He knew his mythology as well as it did, so he would understand. He must understand.

“What do you want me to call you?” he asked.

It was incongruous, talking like this, but there was nothing else to be done. It knew the way, the _shortest way_ to Daisy. The world was no longer as it was, and so what had not been walkable was walkable. It should have been afraid, but if it let itself be afraid, let itself be Jonathan Sims, then it would laugh, and laughing hurt more than just its throat.

_Archive. You. Specific words for objects. Accurate terms._

Martin was suddenly struck by a memory of the first tape Jon had ever recorded. He had been so outraged by the state of the Archive, so determined to make it _precise_ and _ordered_, its contents easily findable. That same instinct seemed to be at play, but it had turned its Eyes on itself.

“Okay,” Martin said. “I’m sorry.”

_Jon Sims was unlucky. I am. _

It reached for Martin’s hand convulsively.

_I am…_

Martin squeezed its hand. “It’s alright,” he said, although it obviously wasn’t. “I love you.” The words seemed to flow naturally, like they had in the weeks before today, but they meant something else, or felt deeper. Could he lie to the archive? He had barely ever wanted to lie to Jon—the situation with Peter Lukas had been something else, something he did not want to dwell on—but it was something else.

He couldn’t think like that. No matter what _it_ thought, it was still Jon. Martin was certain of it.

_We’re close. _

They were in the city now, Martin realized with a start. He had been so focused on the archive, on the strange bubble of stillness through the horror that it created, that he had not noticed the buildings, or the cars parked, empty and screaming, in the middle of the road.

“What is she doing here?” The building had been run down even before the apocalypse, the flats crammed in together in the rickety-fire-trap way that could only exist in the worst, least cared for parts of London.

_A hunter goes to ground. Will she speak to me?_

It made a motion almost like sniffing the air.

_She is not alone_.

It licked dry lips, its head cocked to one side like a curious dog.

_The other hunters. Perhaps I will Know them._

“They didn’t hurt her?”

Another pause, one that Martin didn’t like very much at all.

_What is ‘hurt’ to the Hunt? The scratches and bruises and bites are to be expected. _

It began to walk towards the building. Martin followed, strangely okay with being dragged along.

-

Daisy could smell them before the other two hunters. She stood up. The hairs raised on the back of her neck.

“Wait here,” she said, not bothering to look back at them. They would have protested, but Trevor’s hearing wasn’t what it once was, and Julia was still sleeping off an arm she had broken fighting her way back to the den.

“It’s them, isn’t it,” Trevor said. “Sent you off to die to us. Imagine it’ll be a bit of a shock to see otherwise.”

Daisy bit back a growl. If she fought her packmate every time he insulted her old Archive family, she would get nothing done.

They had all three changed since the sky had gone wrong. Daisy, for her part, no longer bothered to carry weapons of any kind. She didn’t need them, didn’t see the point.

Jonathan Sims—no. Daisy let out a confused huff. Something that looked like Jonathan Sims stood in the hallway, clutching the hand of an impossibly unharmed Martin Blackwood, staring at her in a way that screamed _threat_.

_Safe_.

Its voice sounded like rusty knives and the growl Daisy let out was decidedly inhuman.

“Don’t do that,” she warned. “I don’t know _what_ you are,” she continued. “But you don’t get to go in my head. That’s a privilege that must be _earned_.”

It frowned, and she felt the careful retreat of a presence she had barely noticed, like the slow absence of a headache.

“It says it’s sorry,” Martin said. He winced, and Daisy noticed that he squeezed its hand as he spoke. “Words aren’t something it can really do right now.”

“Funny,” Daisy said. She continued to stare at them both, pointedly not letting them in.

A pained crinkle appeared at the corners of its otherwise unchanging eyes.

“May we come in?” Martin asked, ever polite. Daisy was struck by how long it had been since she had really seen him. Even before the sky went bad, Martin had been doing his best to disappear, and then she had let the Hunt back in.

Daisy made an executive decision. She knew that her packmates were just as curious as she was about how exactly the world had gone so far to hell. “Yes,” she said. “They’re going to try and kill it, I warn you.”

“It knows,” Martin answered.

What had been Jon put a hand over its heart, its expression earnest instead of pained. Daisy wasn’t sure what exactly it was trying to communicate, but she had some idea that it was trying to be non-threatening. That it proceeded to bare its scarred throat to her only confirmed that impression.

She stood aside from the doorway and let them in.

-

The den—and it was a den, the archive was reminded of wolves, or perhaps bears bedded down for the winter—was neater than it had expected. It was not clean in a way a human would appreciate, but it could see the order to the messes and piles, the way three dominant hunters balanced their lives.

It was safe, untouchable by the monsters outside unless those monsters were very, very stupid.

The old Hunter was not happy to see it at all. It still remembered what his voice had sounded like in its mouth and being around him made that part of it that was touched by the Hunt more aware, more cautious. The younger Hunter, touched-by-Darkness Julia Montauk, was even angrier than Trevor, and that did not surprise the archive, but she seemed to appreciate its submission. Neither lunged for it, restrained somehow by Daisy’s tacit approval of its presence.

Trevor still glared at her. “Why’d you let that in here? No wonder what I smelled was so bad, it smells like grave dust and papyrus.”

Neither, it assumed, would appreciate how it spoke. They were more like Daisy, and she more like her.

_Say I am a monster not even worth the chase_.

Martin repeated its words out loud, a frown at the edge of his mouth. The archive decided that it would kiss him later; it did not deserve softness, but he did. He was good.

Trevor laughed. “You remember, then? I suppose you would, with what you are.” He grimaced. “You know what’s made the world like this?”

“I’d like to find that out, too,” Julia said. She was taller than Trevor, shorter than Daisy, and they slotted themselves together on the beat-up but well-cared for couch.

“Can’t say I don’t appreciate the new prey—”

“—But the screaming can get a bit much, and the sky smells wrong.”

“It says…” Martin looked at the archive. It resisted the urge to curl into his side. Whatever the hunters did to it, it deserved. “It says that it is very sorry. That it did not want to do this. That the words were forced through its mouth.” He winced. “That you would know what that is like, having fed statements to the Watcher.”

Three pairs of eyes snapped to look at it in that moment, and it realized that they were all three amber and inhuman.

“You really are a piece of work, aren’t you, archivist?” Trevor said. “Suppose I can’t blame you for this one. Don’t smell any lies on you.” He growled, low in his throat. “What do you want?”

Martin took that moment to finally look down at the makeshift staff he had been holding. “We’re looking for those it cares for, and we’re going to…” He wanted to say _stop this_ but couldn’t. Change the world into something a little less fearful, perhaps. Return all the books to the library. “We’re going to make things right.”


	3. Marking, Claiming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The archive is not merely beholding, but stranger, hunter. 
> 
> Martin wishes the walls of Daisy's apartment were a bit more sound proof.

It was Daisy, in the end, who attacked the archive.

Martin tried to step in, but pain crackled behind his eyes and he found himself unable to do anything as the Hunter slammed it against the crumbling drywall, hand on its throat.

It let out a low whine, the first verbal sound Martin had heard it make since it had woken up in its new state.

Daisy snarled and dug her teeth into the soft flesh of its shoulder, original desire to properly maim subsumed into a strange desire to _claim_.

She pulled away, turning back to look at her packmates. “Its ours,” she said. “I don’t know how, but it’s a Hunter.”

Julia laughed. “This is not what I wanted at all,” she said. She and Trevor flanked Daisy on either side. Again, the archive found itself stared down by three pairs of amber eyes. “What are you hunting, then?”

“Its friends.”

Speaking for the archive when he was not next to it was strange, and it must have been an odd auditory experience.

“You, Daisy. Basira. Georgie. Melanie. Helen, apparently.” He trailed off. The last two in his head couldn’t be right. He had to be misunderstanding it.

_Sasha. Tim_.

The thoughts bore into Martin’s head with steely insistence.

_Sasha. Tim. Alive_.

The archive was almost giddy with what it had just seen, its mouth open in a horrifying slash of a smile.

“Sasha. Tim.”

“We killed what was Sasha,” Daisy said.

Trevor nodded, baring his teeth. “Aye. And burnt it. This one wanted to eat its disgusting heart, but that sort of thing is best left for private spaces, don’t you think?” He chose that moment to grab Julia roughly by the hair, pulling her down across Daisy’s body for a kiss that looked more like he was trying to bite a chunk out of her cheek.

“It wants us to go,” Martin said, this time translating reluctantly. He, at least, needed rest. If no one else was going to acknowledge what had just happened, he would not either.

Daisy laughed. It sounded like Trevor’s laugh. “Oh, no. No, no, Archivist, you’re _ours_ now. You’re not leaving until we’ve claimed you properly.” She looked over at Martin, her eyes momentarily flickering to a more human color. He recognized a concerned expression when he saw one, and he shook his head. He was fine.

“You can’t show up a week after the world goes to shit and expect anything else, even if you do smell like one of us.” Julia stepped closer to it first. Martin couldn’t see her face, but he had the uncomfortable certainly that if he could see her eyes, they would be hungry.

“A week?” Martin asked, but he was being ignored now. Perhaps it was a lonely thing, but he honestly couldn’t feel too bad about it. Whatever was about to happen, Martin was not sure he wanted anything to do with it.

-

Daisy wrapped her hand around the archive’s throat again. It whimpered, already sunk deep into a submissive place it Knew the hunters would like. It had never been fucked by half-feral avatars of this particular fear before, and it wanted, desperately, to know what it was like.

Perhaps it should have been afraid, but it had been floating in a sea of fear so long it could breathe the water like air.

“It doesn’t—” it heard Martin say. “Do you?” His voice sounded very distant, but it could feel his concern/love in the back of its thoughts.

_I want to know what it’s like, like this. And the Hunt is a strong pull_.

There was a difference between what made its non-quite-human body react and what _attraction_ was. It now understood attraction even less than it had as Jon, but a hand on its throat and oldest hunter’s stare both caused a very physical reaction.

It wondered if they noticed how it no longer blinked, how it stared at all of them, drinking in Julia’s expression of rage and excitement, Trevor’s ravenous arousal, the way Daisy held all her tension in her shoulders, waiting to push it even further than she already was.

She took her hand away, and its body slid down the wall until it was sitting, legs at spread, arms akimbo, head tilted to one side.

“You’re not just Beholding, are you?” Trevor asked. “You’re like a broken china doll.” He laughed. “I should find you disgusting. Daisy, carry it to the nest.”

“You’ll pay for that order, old man.”

Trevor laughed again. “I hope so.” He gave the archive a look that was not unkind. “Come on, then. Up you get.”

The archive let itself be pulled into Daisy’s arms. It had not always been this skin-and-bones (if it was made of either), and she made another huff of surprise. “You need to remember to feed,” she said. Her concern was touching, especially after her previous anger.

The archive giggled.

_You_. _This_.

“You’ll be punished for that,” Julia said. It wasn’t that she shared Daisy’s opinion on the archive’s mind-voice, it realized. Daisy’s opinion on the matter _was _Julia’s opinion _was _Trevor’s opinion. They were not only wolves. They were ants.

How strange, it thought, as it was carried away. Julia’s arm, which had been broken when it and Martin arrived, was now whole.

-

Martin was mostly glad to be left to himself in what must have been a living room. There were a few books—Daisy’s?—and a very old television, and if he ignored the sounds coming out of the ‘nest’ he had enough mental space to think.

It had been a week since the world had gone to hell. How was that possible? He had walked behind the archive their whole journey to this place, and it could not have taken them more than a couple of hours. If it truly had been a week, then Martin would have been dead of thirst, or at least absolutely starving. Instead, he was a bit hungry and very, very tired, and he had absolutely not experienced a week’s worth of time.

He found himself chuckling softly to himself. He felt a bit like the archive in that moment, pushed so far beyond fear that all he was left with was hollow humor. So, time was no longer working as it should. Considering they had passed a being formed entirely of hands, eyes, and teeth on their way to the Hunters’ den, this did not surprise him as much as it could have, but it was still a lot to take in.

Why hadn’t the archive mentioned time was passing strangely on their journey? It must have noticed; it Knew everything, now, or least as much everything as one traumatized body could fit. Did it just assume he knew, or could notice it somehow?

There was food in the fridge, normal food, which he hadn’t expected. From Trevor’s talk of eating hearts, he had assumed the hunters were completely cannibalistic, if eating humans could even be considered cannibalism for them anymore.

Well. He was alone again. He didn’t mind, and that wasn’t just a pleasant lie he told himself as he watched Peter slowly isolate him from everyone he held dear.

He could rest. The archive seemed sure that it—they—could fix this mess, somehow, and Martin loved it, and trusted it, enough to believe that was really possible.

-

The archive, cleaned by three pairs of rough-yet-gentle hands, found Martin asleep on the hunters’ ratty couch.

To its surprise, the expression on Trevor’s face was soft when he noticed Martin. Strange, considering what his mouth, his teeth, his hands had been doing so quickly before, but that was the strangeness of pack animals, was it not? Violent, harsh, domineering, teeth and blood and a bite on the inside of its thigh that would take time to heal even on its body, but also soft, fingers carded through his hair, making it feel cared for. Soft like how Martin was soft, but he had treated it like an equal in the golden days before it had stopped being Jon; the hunters knew it was small, that it must be taken and marked and claimed.

That was the Hunt part of itself, though they seemed to like the stranger, delicate, doll-like qualities it now possessed as well.

It kissed Martin to wake him up.


	4. Thousand Eye Stare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is where things get really sexual, and Trevor ruins the mood.

The archive let itself rest for a day.

“Why didn’t you tell me it had been a week?” Martin asked. It stared at him, finding itself confused, and pleased and surprised at its confusion. Was there something it did not know, a piece of information it could collect from Martin.

(It could feel the fear and frustration radiating off of him, and it was all it could do not to drink it into itself, even after its feeding at the hands of the hunters. It would have to ask him. Martin was good; he deserved to be asked.)

_A week?_ it asked. That was the time since it had broken the world, yes. A week and a day now, and _Oh._

It curled itself against Martin, wrapping too-long arms around his torso, burrowing its face into his shoulder so it could smell him. One good part of not using its mouth was it could ‘speak’ even as it mouthed worriedly at his neck, making little keening noises as Martin tightened his arms around it.

_I thought you felt it. I didn’t know_.

“I—” Martin started and clutched more tightly. “I’m just human. You Know that.” He hid his shock that he could have missed something well.

_More than_. _Eye, lonely. _Mine_. _

It didn’t mean to get so intense, but it had said this before, and Martin had to know. He was its, and it. Was. _His_.

It kissed him. Martin made a surprised noise before returning it, pulling away only to ask, “Are you sure?” Was he crying? Perhaps he was crying. He was tired, after all, and sad for the archive and worried about the strange time. The archive licked at his tears experimentally.

Martin laughed. “That feels strange. But you haven’t answered the question.” He knew that it had been okay with kissing, with touching, with _watching_, when they had thought that it had won, but of course he would think perhaps things had changed. It had changed, after all, word by word, unwilled breath by unwilled breath.

_Yes. I want to taste you. _

Martin wasn’t sure how to take that. The archive showed affection strangely, now, and he couldn’t help the feeling that he was a favorite insect in a slide collection somewhere, carefully taken to pieces and stained with dark red ink.

_The center_.

Martin wasn’t sure if that metaphor was any better, but he couldn’t deny the bone deep satisfaction he felt at the idea of being the archive’s. It, he thought, in some quiet corner of his mind, would never leave him alone.

The archive kissed him again, and Martin gasped as it forced its tongue into his mouth before pulling away. It pressed a line of kisses down his jaw and neck and chest. He was surprised when it didn’t bother to undress him, long, steady fingers instead going straight for the fly in his trousers.

Martin was half-hard already, and he groaned aloud as the archive took him into its mouth. Were its teeth sharper than they had been? He shivered, hoping, _knowing_, that it would be careful.

A pleased giggle filtered into the back of his mind, momentarily turning Martin’s blood to ice. What?

_stranger, seer, slaughter, hunter…_

It flicked its tongue against the sensitive head of Martin’s cock.

_spider, spider, spider, spider…_

When the archive looked up at him, he saw the flesh-hive scars blink open into hundreds of tiny, iridescent eyes.

He came with a violence that surprised him, unable to close his eyes against the archive’s gaze.

It let his cock drop out of his mouth and nuzzled at the inside of his thigh.

_spider, spider…_

“The shower’s still got some hot water left.”

Trevor’s voice broke Martin out of his daze. The archive ignored him, carefully neatening Martin back up before curling into his lap.

Martin stared at the old hunter, feeling very much like a deer in headlights, or perhaps a fish trapped behind the glass of a too-small tank.

“We—” he started, and then something in his thoughts broke, and whatever sense of shame he’d once had broke. He hoped feverishly it was the Hunt’s influence, that it would pass once he had left the apartment. “It sucked me off.”

“Aye,” Trevor said. There was something off in his voice. “I can tell.” He watched the two of them. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” he asked, the pronouns ambiguous enough that for a moment Martin couldn’t tell if he was talking about the archive or the circumstance in general. “A sort of intensity. Like its eating your pleasure.”

He was talking about the sex, then.

The archive hummed in the back of both of their minds. It seemed, despite their protestations, the archive had slowly crawled its way into their thoughts anyway.

“Yes,” Martin said. “Did it. Did its eyes open, too?”

“Yes,” Trevor said. “Julia’s still shaken by it. She and Daisy are calming each other down.”

He sat heavily on low wooden table.

“You want me to talk about that, don’t you?” he asked, addressing the archive. It shifted in Martin’s lap so that it could watch him. Trevor sighed, shaking his head. “I can feel you pulling. What do you want to know?” He said it without any real grudge. At Martin’s surprised expression, he shook his head again. “I feed the Hunt. The world has broken, and the sky watches us all. Who am I to grudge the Eye a meal? I take care of my pack.”

“What is your relationship with Daisy Tonner and Julia Montauk?”

All three of them noticed the _click-hiss_ of a tape recorder turning on.

The archive giggled.

Trevor stared at it, before inhaling a careful breath.

“I meant it to be parental,” Trevor started. “Spend enough time hunting alongside someone and you grow to care for them. I’d never done that, before—always fancied myself more of the lone wolf type—but then, Julia. You must’ve noticed how we were when we came to the Archive to find you, before that… _thing_ set upon and you set Daisy upon us both, but that was the Hunt. The Hunt made us sharper together, our thoughts in sync in a way I had never felt in all my years of hunting.

“Even before, though, the Hunt wouldn’t let our relationship be simple. That’s why it felt like Daisy was mocking us when she called me Julia’s da. I’ve never had a child, but I’d never do to them what I did to Julia, and I hope no child’s ever done to their parent what she’s done to me. It’s the blood, the thrill of the chase, blood in our veins and our hearts and our ears. The chase ends, the prey is caught, but the feeling… it doesn’t end.

“So, you redirect it. I don’t remember who started it, Julia’s cock in my mouth or… god I’d not been fingered in years, didn’t even really think there was anything left to me. But it wasn’t all that, wasn’t all just rough sex. It was like dogs in a pile after a long day, but not dogs.”

Trevor grinned in a way that felt like a threat than an expression of happiness.

“People forget it, but apes are predators. Wolves, lions, tigers—people like those metaphors. But that was never the hunting I did, not really. Oh, yes, we stalked, and we ambushed, and we waited, but most importantly, we endured. If a human can walk for miles without tiring, we can walk further. And after a long day, Julia and I would fall into another. Sometimes it was rough, like I said, but sometimes it was almost… grooming. Hair petting. Like monkeys, or bonobos.”

“And then, a week ago, you siced Daisy, your runt hunter, on us. We meant to fight her, of course, get through her and to the tunnels and kill you. I wanted to kill you quickly. Julia wanted to flay your flesh open and watch the blood pump out of your heart as it spasmed to death.

“Then that thing, the not thing, tried to kill us, and our blood sang with Daisy’s blood as we killed it, and when we came too from our blood drunkenness, there she was, naked and streaked with blood, and she was ours. We were hers.”

He chuckled.

“And now you’re ours.”

The archive smiled lazily, its many eyes sharing one sated expression. The statement, if it could be called a statement, was short, but it was full from it and other things.

_Help us_.

“Soon,” Trevor said. “Soon.”


	5. Always Carry Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Corruption is encountered behind the face of an old 'friend.'

The five of them sat in the living room, the three hunters curled into each other on the floor, the archive and Martin on the couch.

“I made her promise to kill me,” Daisy whispered. She seemed more like she had been when she was resisting the hunt—coltish, unsteady on her feet, like a breeze would knock her over. “I was sure when I let the Hunt fill me that it would be like before. I didn’t want to be that, anymore.”

Julia hugged Daisy more tightly against herself.

“I’ll kill her,” Julia said, and Trevor hummed his assent, teeth against the flesh of Daisy’s neck.

Daisy laughed. She sounded happier than Martin had heard her in a long, long time, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “I hope not,” she said. “Maybe she’ll join us instead.”

“You were pushing it with the archive,” Trevor said, bite absent from his voice. “You know where she is?”

The archive bared its teeth in a positively unpleasant smile.

_Of course. I have her within me_.

It felt Martin’s hands still from where he had been petting its hair.

“What?”

“She’s still at the Archives,” Daisy said flatly. “Is that it?”

Its smiled widened.

_What have I wrought upon this Earth? What has Jonah Magnus brought unto my threshold and my home?_

Daisy shuddered. “I am going to kill Jonah Magnus,” she said quietly.

The archive’s only response was another burst of laughter.

-

They walked from the den to the Institute with Martin and the archive between Julia and Trevor in front and Daisy in the back.

She was afraid of seeing Basira again. She did not hate herself, or think herself particularly monstrous—there was no shortage of real monsters to kill nowadays—but she remembered her absolute terror at the idea of the Hunt claiming her again, and the taste of blood in her mouth as her teeth had sharpened into canines as she faced down Julia and Trevor.

Was it that she had a pack now? There had always been the other sectioned officers, or the people at the Institute, but that was different. The police made each copper a lone wolf among lone wolves, and each Eye-slave had their own fear to worry about, but to be with her pack was to exist in the purity of the Hunt, of the Chase.

None of them were particularly reverent to their god, except in feeding it, but the feeling that this was not the world of the Everchase, that the Everchase had not been meant to end like this, gnawed at her like an old muscle strain.

She had been so hungry for so long. It was the right thing, cutting herself off, but she couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret anyway. Of course, resisting no longer seemed plausible, and she sighed as she looked at the archive, how its clothes were too large, and its hair had gone slick like magnetic tape. Julia had found its many, many eyes upsetting, but Daisy had come the moment she had felt that gaze upon her.

Jon had come to get her in the Buried, and the archive had come to fetch her in the world gone to hell.

Trevor and Julia stopped, and Daisy started as the stench of something fowl and insectoid hit her nostrils. They were, according to the vague mental sense of proximity the archive broadcast, about halfway to the Institute, and about a day had passed outside the path.

The archive went absolutely still. Daisy wasn’t even sure that it was breathing. Martin, for his part, looked like he wanted to be terrified but couldn’t quite muster up the energy for it anymore.

Something spiderlike crawled into their path.

“Jon…” it whispered, voice like silk sandpaper. “It’s been so long, Jon…”

The archive’s presence in her thoughts, which Daisy had stopped objecting with almost-strange ease, became pain.

Daisy realized with borrowed Knowing that this was Mr. Spider, but it was Mr. Spider _wrong_. Mr. Spider, and the way the Knowing burrowed into her thoughts was almost sing-song, was Web, a puppeteer, close kin to the Eye and in possession of many eyes himself.

This… _thing_ was Corrupt. Viscous, yellow fluid dripped unpleasantly from the joints of its legs, and its bulbous abdomen was swollen with what Daisy quickly realized were crawling worms.

It stared at their group, towering over even Daisy. Its eyes were the same color as the archivist’s eyes, pale dots against rotting carapace. It smelled disgusting, and it moved in that skittering way that was tolerable only in creatures several orders of magnitude smaller. 

Had it found the archive alone, Mr. Spider could have won. The archive was new, and scared, and not yet comfortable in all of its power.

The archive was not alone, and Mr. Spider was met by three pairs of glowing eyes, three pairs of tearing hands, and three mouths full of sharp teeth.

Spiders, even monstrous spiders that spewed filth, did not do well without legs, or with punctured abdomens. The worms fell out. Daisy caved thorax head in. Trevor tore at its soft underbelly. Julia pulled a lighter from somewhere in her clothes and set its face alight.

Its screamed joined with that of the worms, and Mr. Spider and parasites both fell to burning as the archive huddled in Martin’s arms.

“When did you start carrying a lighter?” the archive asked. It sounded almost like Jon in that moment, the question spoken aloud but with only a hint of compelling weight behind it.

“My father and mother were cultists of the Dark,” Julia said. “It seems only natural.”

The archive shuddered.

_Sorry_.

Daisy snorted. “Are you really still trying to be moderate?” She ignored Martin’s glare. “You broke the world. I think you can do what you want now.” She stopped, staring up at the still-twitching, still-burning husk of Mr. Spider. Was this why she had asked Basira to kill her?

The archive laughed again.

_Daisy, Daisy, we musn’t all forget_.

Daisy glared at it.

_At least we’re here…_

Daisy looked up. They were, not just on the street outside the building proper, but in the archive itself.

A great eye where the ceiling ought to have been stared back at them.


	6. Detective

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is Basira?

Martin very carefully did not scream.

_Don’t worry. We are only here for the Detective. It shall let us pass, and if it does not…_

It flickered in a way that reminded Martin far too much of the Distortion.

“Julia, Trevor,” Daisy said, a growl deep in her voice. “Guard this room.” It was a pointless request, one with the obvious undercurrent of _do not follow us_.

“Absolutely not—” “—You can’t—” They protested at the same time, with one voice, almost.

“Stay,” Daisy ordered again. She was met with twin glares, one old, one young. “Please.” Her voice softened on the second word, no longer an order but a very direct plea. “I don’t want you to—”

Martin wondered how much of the Hunters’ apparent control was due to the archive, or for his (mostly) human benefit. What were they like in the time that had passed?

_A day_.

“Fine,” Julia said. She smiled brightly at the archive. “You may be ours, but you will do no harm to her.”

The archive nodded.

_The Detective. We will find the Detective_.

Martin was sure it meant Basira. It could not mean something else wearing her face, something like the archive.

The Institute was a mess. Of course it was; the sky had opened and hell had broken loose, the things this place kept chained up would not remain, could not remain, for long. The archive catalogued the mess with calm detachment and moved on, moving from room to room with seeming indifference to the all-watching Eye.

When Martin first saw her, he let himself hope for a moment that the archive was just being fanciful. She was facing away from them, her back ramrod straight, and what parts of her skin he could see did not seem to be any different from how they had always been.

_Archive. _

_Detective._

Basira turned, and Martin saw that her face was dotted with dark eyes.

_I brought the world to its completion. _

_There is still so much to seek. _

Basira—the detective—turned to Daisy.

_I made a promise_.

She was solemn, expression unchanged. She slowly walked towards Daisy. Martin finally noticed the blade in her hand.

The archive grabbed her wrist as she moved to strike.

_She found a pack._

The detective looked at Daisy, head cocked to the side. Like the archive had done outside the den, she seemed to taste the air, checking… something.

_You are not alone. Good._

She dropped the knife and pulled a stunned Daisy against herself into a hug.

“How did you get here?” she asked, out loud. Martin did his best to cover his shock.

“I knew the way,” the archive answered. Its voice sounded rusty. “Basira—”

“We both changed, Jon.”

“Right.”

Martin could have sworn the archive was almost Jon in that moment, but that was probably just his fancy.

Daisy kissed the detective before anything else could happen.

“Kill me,” she said, still shocked. “I’m not—”

The detective shut her up with another kiss.

_You found a pack_.

Her mental voice was less scraping than the archive’s.

_Leave?_

The archive touched the detective gently on the shoulder, before retreating back to Martin’s side, leaning its head against his neck.

_Yes_.

“Will…” Daisy started, struggling to talk after the kissing. “Will it let you leave?” She pointedly did not look up at the ceiling, which was still watching them.

_I will let us leave_.

Something caught in Martin’s throat.

The archive seemed to notice his distress. It squeezed his hand.

_I share this place of power with Jonah Magnus. Despite what he has done, he no longer controls the archive. He controlled Jonathan Sims. He does not control me. _

The world blinked, and they were back in the den.

“What name do you want?” Martin asked the detective. Her presence was less obtrusive the archive’s, less alien and mind-scraping.

_Any works. I may only speak in question, but I am… I am not the archive. My purpose is not only to See. _She smiled and looked questioningly at Daisy. _I am not to kill you. _“May I kiss you?”

She was more formal than Basira—was she still Basira? Her answer had not been as certain as Martin would have liked.

Daisy kissed Basira with surprising tenderness. Martin had expected the same violence she had shown the archive, but instead it was much like how the archive treated Martin.

It was then that Martin noticed Julia and Trevor staring at the archive.

“You brought us here even though you were nowhere near us,” Trevor said. “You’re… vast.” He chuckled and looked at Daisy and the detective. “The two of you need a moment?”

The detective nodded and dragged Daisy into the bedroom with the force Martin had expected from Daisy.

“How much time did we lose today?” Martin asked the archive. Maybe it was redundant to say today, but it made him feel just a little bit better.

_Another day_.

It smiled at him. _Kiss me?_

Martin returned its smile. “Yes,” he said. 

-

“They’re going to make us rescue everyone, aren’t they?” Julia grumbled. She’d grabbed something to drink. Trevor had joined her. The subdivision into couples felt good, little pieces of the pack splitting off to groom and pet and fuck.

“I think so,” Trevor said, taking a swig directly from his bottle. Julia still bothered with a glass. She needed, it seemed, those brief touches of humanity despite first Hunt and now Apocalypse. “Define rescue.”

“Bring here,” Julia said. “Join the pack.”

Trevor snorted. “I don’t know if they’ll all be pack,” he said. “Could get unwieldly.”

Julia shrugged. “The archive’s ours. That makes whatever’s its ours, too.”

He nodded. He felt it, deep in the strange little core of himself.

“It’s delicious,” Julia finally said. “I should want to take it by its bony shoulders and demand it tell us how to fix the world, but the world is delicious, now. If only it were perfect.”

This wasn’t the good Everchase. The Hunt had lost its purity and prey was everywhere, easily found and caught and tasted.

“Perhaps it will help us,” Trevor said.

Julia smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

She let herself wonder, for a moment, how Elias Bouchard might feel about that. 


	7. help me, pied piper. help me, voice of dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> end and slaughter and kitty; _FIND MELANIE AND GEORGIE_; sh, archive, sh, we will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for taking so long! i have been writing... many other things. And have homework. That I should be doing.

Melanie woke Georgie up with a soft hand on her left shoulder.

“We should go out,” she said. “The Admiral is uneasy.”

“He knows what’s going on,” Georgie said. “He can See.”

Melanie laughed softly. “I can hear the capital letter,” she said. “Come on. It’s hell already.”

They made it down one block, the Admiral in his harness, Melanie and Georgie holding hands, when the air broke in front of them and a whole mess of people fell out.

“Jon,” Georgie said. She sounded upset. Melanie squeezed her hand and glared at the direction she had spoken.

Her soft gasp was more upsetting than her words. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“Don’t do what?” Melanie asked, confused and irritated, especially at Jon, who, it seemed, was excellent at hurting those Melanie cared about even now, even after everything was awful.

“You can’t hear its voice?”

“Basira?”

“More or less.”

Melanie heard high-pitched, reedy laughter.

“The Archive doesn’t like the name Jon anymore,” Martin said, somberly. “It is glad you cannot See it. That means you are safe.”

Melanie sighed. “I don’t know about that,” she said. She clutched her sword she often forgot she held. “The Eye’s absence has let other… things, flow in.”

More reedy laughter, reminding Melanie of Helen.

“It says that this means the sky cannot touch you, and that it is glad.”

Martin speaking for… what had been Jon was strange. Melanie didn’t like it at all, and found herself backing away, half-dragging Georgie with her. “Why are you here, then?”

“It wants everyone to be safe. You will be safer with a pack.”

That made Melanie laugh. “A pack? You sound like the Hunt.”

Martin sighed. “Things have… changed. Can you come with us?”

“Yes,” Melanie said, feeling Georgie’s surprise. “On one condition.”

“Anything.” That voice was Jon, Melanie realized, even as she thought it sounded rather like corpse nails. There was no weight to it either, only a pang of desperation. “For you.”

“Let me help.”

She took the silence for confusion and laughed. “Let me help kill the other monsters. Georgie can help, too, she doesn’t fear anything.”

What had been Jon made a hollow sucking noise, like air being drawn in through clenched teeth.

“It says no, that’s not true.”

Georgie looked away from Melanie out of the habit of shame.

“Georgie, what is it talking about?” She hated Jon, hated the Archive, but Martin’s words sounded good, sounded like people who could help her kill and string up the things that roamed the street. She didn’t need Eyes to sink her weapon into flesh, only… fellow hunters.

Well, fuck.

“Melanie, I meant to tell you—” Her voice was soft, her grip on Melanie’s hand bone-breaking. “Since the sky opened up, I’ve heard her.”

“Who.” She didn’t phrase it as a question—couldn’t—and didn’t have to. She had a suspicion, even though she desperately did not want to.

“The corpse.” She stopped speaking.

Melanie opened her mouth, about to beg Georgie to continue before the rest could be pulled out of her like candy floss, but she was too late.

“What did it say?”

It wasn’t what had been Jon who spoke. It was Basira, and that hurt worse than Melanie expected. Basira was supposed to be _sane_.

Georgie shuddered. “It said _The end has spat what it has took; the dead have flown the nest. If change must come, then change _will_ come, and no one may have rest_. I’ve been trying to ignore it, because it can’t mean what it sounds like.”

“Oh, it does,” Basira said. “I am certain of that, hearing you speak. I am sorry, Georgie. It seems you have been made a mouthpiece.”

“There is no escape, is there?” Melanie asked. She felt a little hollow at her own words, or maybe not. Maybe those hollows in herself had already been filled some time ago. “Not really.”

“There’s still time for a happy ending,” Martin said. He sounded surer of himself than Melanie had ever heard him. “None of us has to hurt ever again.”

“This isn’t a happy ending,” Melanie said.

“Are you sure?” Martin asked. Melanie grimaced. It didn’t have the weight of one of their questions, but she still didn’t like the sound of it from him. “You have Georgie. You have the Admiral. You’re alive. You’re in love.” She could picture him smiling. “We’re all in this alone. If we find everyone—I think that could very well be called a happy ending.”

“How do you square that with the world?”

“I don’t. I’ve been thinking—I want the Archive to be happy. I want my pack to be happy. I don’t… _can’t_ care about anything else.” He sighs, small and strange. “I understand if you don’t want that.” She imagines him shrugging. “I’ve made my decision.”

“What happened to fighting for your humanity as much as possible?” Melanie asked, feeling a little bitter. It couldn’t be that easy. They’d all spent so much time trying to force or bully or train Jon out of his problem, she’d gouged her eyes out to escape, and now none of that mattered.

It took him a long time to answer her. Melanie let herself feel the satisfaction of that small victory.

“The archive isn’t human anymore. Julia, Daisy, Trevor, Basira—they’re not human anymore. I don’t know what I am, but I know what I care about.”

Melanie let the feeling of the sword in one hand and Georgie’s hand in the other ground her as she tried to gather her thoughts, and more importantly, her feelings. She couldn’t hear what had been Jon. She was still immune from the Eye. Even though the world was broken, it had not truly ended, and Martin wasn’t… wrong.

“Georgie,” Melanie said, trying not to sound a little broken. “How many dead.”

She could hear Georgie swallow. “Everyone,” Georgie said, her voice a little lower, rougher, than it should have been. “In time.”

The number of the dead contained many bad people, people Melanie hated with even more itching immediacy. It fed that part of her that liked the sword to know that the killing would never end, that the End had shrugged its duty leaving itself in the hands of others. Her hands, even.

“Fine,” Melanie said. She still wanted to _help_, whatever that would mean. “We bring the Admiral.”

What had been Jon made a small cooing noise of happiness. Melanie, to her surprise, did not flinch.

“Follow us,” Martin said, to them both. “We’re going home.”


	8. Warmth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I completely forget my own plans for this fic and write soft Lonely Eyes. 
> 
> Oh, and Martin has an epiphany.

The archive was still restless when they all returned to the apartment. Melanie, Georgie, and the Admiral were all busy introducing themselves wearily to the Hunters, or reintroducing, in the case of Daisy, but the archive wandered to the bathroom and began to tap the mirror with one too-long finger.

It met Martin’s gaze in its reflection, all of its eyes except for the two on its face closed for the moment.

_I don’t know what I want_. _I wanted to fix the world because I thought that’s what you wanted, but you said_…

It shuddered, mouth open, and fell forward, catching itself on the sink before it could hit the mirror with its face, something like a tooth or maybe a marble or maybe a fly falling from between its lips and disappearing down the drain.

“It’s so beautiful, Martin. I have to stop myself from leaving my body completely to just… watch.”

Words, but it still wasn’t Jon, exactly, and Martin wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be.

“I wish the End hadn’t thrown a tantrum. Then it would be perfect, then the people who want to hurt you wouldn’t be back. But we have to find them—” agitated, it stopped speaking again, mouth dropping back open. _I have to keep them close. You’re mine, you’re all _mine_ and I need. _

It kissed him when it said _I need Jonah Magnus _and let out a broken little laugh. _I can’t… I wanted to _hate_ and _fix,_ but I can’t, Martin, look at this world _I _made. _An eye blinked open at its throat, hard and dry like a spider’s. _It’s beautiful_.

“We can make it beautiful,” Martin said, taking its hand in his. He ignored, though not well, the part of himself that desired only to disappear the world, leaving the two of them alone. Those instincts were not pleasant beside the new ones the Hunt brought with it.

Its smile was bright and full of teeth. _Like you!_

“You’ll never leave me?” Martin asked, putting his worst fear into words, the one that caught in his chest when he thought of Elias, somewhere, triumphant.

The Archive’s smile never wavered. _I’ll always take you with me_.

-

Elias had not planned to do this. This was his time of triumph; he should be basking in his victory and planning for his archive’s inevitable arrival.

Instead, he had boarded the _Tundra _and stared quietly at the First Mate, who recognized him enough to know what to do.

“We know he is gone,” was the one thing said to him.

Elias had smiled, and said, “Nothing is truly gone.”

He spent the time it took to get out to that loneliest of places not speaking, keeping an Eye on his archive. Friendship? Interesting. He supposed it was difficult to be Lonely and Hunter in one, not to mention every other thing that now flowed through it.

Melanie, of course, wished to kill him. Daisy and her little pack were more ambivalent. Basira… Elias enjoyed watching Basira. She was nearly as empty as the Archive. 

He pulled Peter out of the sea on a stormy day. He took a small boat from the main body of the _Tundra _and hauled him up by hand.

“You lost,” Elias said. He let himself drift, cradling Peter’s unconscious form. “I made the world all mine.”

Peter blinked and struggled upright, vomiting water and seaweed on Elias’s lap. “Only you would wear a suit in the rain,” he said. “How am I here?” He avoided Elias’s eyes. “I didn’t tell your pet what you wanted to do with him,” he said. His voice was soft, anxious, reminding Elias pleasantly of Martin.

“I know,” Elias said, soothing Peter as though he was worried about betraying Elias, which he certainly was not. “How was it?”

“Empty,” Peter said. “I was away from everything.” He sounded more awed than he ever had when encountering Elias’s god. “Why am I back? I’ve been… floating. It was more than that Silence.” He smiled. “Elias, I can’t drown.”

“It seems Death is angry,” he said. “It did not wish for the world to change.”

Peter coughed again. “What now? Are you going to let me go?”

“No. I’m sorry,” he said, with perfect insincerity. “I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

Peter sighed. He was so weak, like a baby panda.

“We’re going back to the _Tundra_ now,” Elias said. “Sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“That’s not comforting,” Peter said.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

-

Peter woke up in his own bed. This was an extremely unpleasant realization, because it reminded him of both his renewed corporality and who exactly had rescued him.

“Good morning,” Elias said.

“Is it?”

There was very little light streaming in through the open window.

Elias laughed.

“Time is strange, now,” he said. “I was merely being polite.”

Sitting up, Peter saw that Elias had reclined himself in a chair on the other side of his room wearing a robe Peter had bought years ago, his gaze fixed pointedly on Peter.

“What have you been doing?” Peter asked.

Elias smiled. “Eating.”

“Ugh,” Peter said. “I hate being a meal.”

Elias laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I wasn’t watching you.”

Peter pouted. “Liar,” he said, and sat up. He spent a long moment looking at the bumps his legs made in the blanket. His pout went from theatrical to an expression of genuine despair. “You didn’t need to bring me back,” he said. He sounded more broken than Elias expected. “I don’t want to be back.”

“We all endure corporeality the best we can,” Elias said. His smile twisted. “I expected my god to take mine away. It seems we are all a little disappointed.”

“Come here,” Peter demanded. He pushed the blankets off his legs. He was, of course, as old as he had ever been, but his rage felt small and petty and childlike, especially as he was naked in a home he had thought he would never see or need again. “I’m not letting this be any more pleasant for you.”

“What,” Elias asked, his smile unchanged, “are you proposing to do to me?”

Peter glared, but his expression softened as Elias sat himself down at the foot of the bed. “Why are you staring?” he asked. Tension seemed to coil slowly inside his shoulders and at the base of his spine.

Elias meant to say, “You remind me of a small Australian mammal.”

Instead, he said, “You are beautiful.”

Peter sputtered and reached out a hand to grab Elias around the wrist. Elias let himself be pulled down onto Peter’s chest, unbalanced by his own surprise at his candor, feeling his robe slip off the upper part of his body.

“That’s not how the game goes,” Peter said, his nails biting into Elias’s flesh. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

He punctuated the question with a bite to Elias’s shoulder, not quite breaking the skin.

“That won’t make me kill you,” Elias said. “Nothing will.”

“Damn,” Peter said.

“As for what’s wrong with me,” Elias said, taking one of Peter’s hand and placing it on his own chest, covered with both of his hands. “I can have anything I want in this world. And I want to have you.”

Peter chuckled. “Are you coming onto me, Elias Bouchard?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” Elias said. “I am, however, going to fall asleep on top of you, so if you don’t mind, continue being offputtingly warm.”

“I didn’t think you slept, anymore,” Peter said. He stroked Elias’s hair unconsciously. “So,” he said. “You decided to keep this body?”

Elias didn’t reply. He seemed to be, more or less, play-acting sleep, but Peter himself had never quite kicked the habit, and let himself drift off beneath that familiar-yet-unfamiliar weight.


	9. Send in the Clowns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another friend is found, another entity encountered (ish).
> 
> The Corruption, it seems, is unhappy.

_Sasha. Tim_.

Martin woke with the weight of the Archive’s voice in his mind.

“They’re dead,” he said, more out of habit than anything else.

_Come on, then. It is time for a circus._

“A circus?”

_We are to find Tim! _It smiled. _He has changed so much since we last knew him_.

It grabbed him by the hand and pulled. And Martin—Martin went along. That was what he did, now. He went along with the Archive and hoped it would never grow so enraptured with the world of now that it would stop looking at him.

-

A hunt was on their way to the circus. The prey and hunter alike could not see them, but Martin could not help the spikes of fear that pierced him as he watched them go ‘round and ‘round the green woods. It was dark, the moon’s light half-bright and cut by the branches of great oak trees, and the hunter screamed in delight as it pursued its prey.

“Why can’t any of them see us?” he asked, thinking of how what had been Mr. Spider had seen them. “Why are they different from Daisy and her friends?” It was hard to think of the Hunters as anything else, even after knowing what they had done to and with the Archive.

It sighed.

_You do not dream_. _There are no nightmares what touch you, only me. Only the Eye. Only I may touch you, see you, affect you. You are mine, and Eye will protect you._

Too much, Martin thought. Like the spider to the fly, or an ant with its army to a spider in turn.

“Thank you,” he said, and kissed its cheek.

The woods disappeared soon enough, leaving a great wide clearing full of tents.

_The End has a cruel sense of humor_ it thought. _Follow me_.

They found him propped up against a support pole inside the big-top. The seats, the ring, the trailers outside, were all empty, except for the sad doll Martin would have overlooked if he hadn’t been following the Archive.

From a distance, Tim looked almost peaceful, or perhaps asleep. Then, as Martin drew closer, he noticed the splayed limbs, the joints connected by bits of dark blue string, the neck that looked as though it could be removed. The hair was the same, and the skin color was uncanny in its accuracy, but this was not a human being.

Martin looked over at the Archive. That was also not a human being.

As though startled, Tim pulled his jointed limbs together and stood up, eyes opening only when he was fully vertical. “I should have known you were behind this,” he said. His voice sounded as though it came from far away. “I think this is my old voice box, somewhere, in here.” He tapped his throat with a jointed finger.

_Tim_.

Martin, it seemed, had grown to like the metal-on-metal sound of its voice.

“I was supposed to be dead,” Tim said, face unable to frown as his voice implied he wished to. “Why did you take that from me?”

The Archive shook its head, brow furrowed in sudden anger. _No. I took nothing. The End is throwing a fit, and here you are. Join us?_

Tim rolled his glass eyes. “Even the circus has abandoned me, and here you are, rescuing me? How can I be sure this isn’t just another nightmare?”

The Archive’s eyes flared with sick green light. _You are _mine_, Timothy Stoker_. Its voice was harsher than television static in headphones, harsher than metal scraping against a tooth. _Pretend you have a choice or no, you are coming home with us_.

Tim forced his gaze away from the Archive, turning his eyes (if not his head) towards Martin. “And you,” he demanded. “What are you getting out of all of this? Surely a crush isn’t worth—” He gestured floppily at the world around them, at the empty circus tent, at the darkless sky above.

“I love the Archive,” Martin said. “I like what it can do.” He swallowed, heavily. “A lot.”

Tim sighed noisily, an angry buzz of a sound.

His grip, when he grabbed the Archive roughly by the throat and pressed it against the side of the stands, was tighter than a doll’s ought to be.

An eye opened under Tim’s hand, and the Archive shocked both him and Martin by letting out a little choked moan.

Tim let go of its throat, and it collapsed on the ground against the stands, limbs askew much as Tim’s had been.

_That’s… unexpected_.

It looked up at Tim.

_We are seeking Sasha next_. _You want to find her._

“Do you think there’s anything of her left?” Tim asked. “Even here, I can’t—I can’t remember her face.”

Perhaps it was even a blessing that his face could not make quite a proper expression anymore.

_Yes. I do not think. I only know. _It grimaced, wishing that it _knew_ more about what Sasha had become. _She is, however, still touched by the Stranger. The End is sick. _

Tim cackled. “Tell me something new,” he said. He looked back at Martin. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll follow the two of you home.”

It smiled, and Martin’s heart clenched violently in his chest.

-

“Did… did you wake up alone?” Martin asked.

Tim did not answer. He was so glad that the archive’s tendencies had not rubbed off on its boyfriend, even if he could no longer find it in himself to blame it for anything.

Martin fell silent. The only other thing he’d said had been to instruct Tim to not look anywhere except straight ahead. When asked why, he had flinched and said something about the danger of an unwary gaze.

Tim had not woken up alone. He did not recognize any of the performers who arrayed themselves around the ring like prized animals, but he recognized what they were. Dolls, every one of them, from a small porcelain figurine with fingers that moved despite its lack of joints, to a tall scarecrow, its black clothes stuck through with straw escaping its burlap skin.

They had left when they felt the Eye focus, abandoning the big top for the stranger forest. They had not bothered to talk to Tim. They knew what he was. He may look like them, but he had been claimed by the power that now oversaw the world the moment he stepped into the Institute for the first time.

Finally: “And there’s no way to fix the world?”

“No,” Martin said, with a little sigh that probably meant he didn’t mean this as bad news.

Tim felt very small at his next question: “And… me?”

“I don’t know,” Martin said. This time, he sounded almost sorry. “Are you in pain?”

“No,” Tim said. “I don’t… feel pain, I think. Not in the way I used to.” He could barely remember what pain _meant_. He knew what it meant to be damaged, but _hurt _belonged to a different Tim, the one who died when he blew up.

Martin stopped. Tim did not run into him, but it was a near thing.

“Not again,” he said, quietly.

Tim noticed the archive reach back and grab his hand.

“What?”

“The corruption,” Martin said, grimly. “It’s spreading.”

For the first time since he woke up, Tim recognized someone other than his two ‘rescuers,’ and she made him glad indeed that he no longer had a stomach to empty. 

_You_.

The archive stood motionless in front of a half-melted mannequin.

Nikola giggled. “Hello,” she said. It seems I’ve been let back out.” Her skin, if plastic could be called skin, was mottled with mold, and blank eyes rolled in half-collapsed sockets. She did not look quite as she had—she was, somehow, more articulated—but from Martin’s reaction Tim realized she must be giving off quite the putrid odor.

“What does she smell like?” Tim asked, not thinking about how that revealed his loss of a sense.

“Rot,” Martin said. “Like Mr. Spider had.”

“The lines are blurry when your gaze is turned away, Archivist,” she said. Her body made flesh sounds as she walked closer.

“I don’t need to kill you,” the archive said. Its physical speaking voice did not sound much better than its projected thoughts, as though its throat were a bed of nails. “Only let me pass.”

“You’re not going to stop her?” Tim asked. He wanted to rush in front of the archive and confront Orsinov himself, but he could not seem to pass Martin. He was more than just standing in Tim’s way. He made the small strip of ground between the two of them and the archive seem infinite in its distance.

“Only if she tries to hurt us,” Martin said. “Only if she tries to feed on something bigger than her.”

“I…” A reordering of priorities, then. He had been dead for too long. “Fine.”

Martin relaxed, and the distance contracted.

“Imagine if we corrupted _you_, Archivist,” the dead clown was saying. “How far would the Eye spread…”

“No,” the archive said, a firm declaration of volition. “You’ll have to _try_ for that one.”

She laughed. “That’s what I’ve always done.” She frowned, despite having no muscles with which to move her painted-on mouth. “Until you ruined it.”

Her gaze flicked to Tim for the first time. Tim wondered, feeling suddenly a little hysterical, if the corruption could spread by sight alone. “You,” she said. “You blew up my Unknowing.”

“It would never have worked,” the archive said. “Every ritual would have failed with no intervention at all.”

“Except yours.”

“Except mine.” It was proud of itself for that. Tim supposed it couldn’t help it.

“Fuck you,” Orsinov said. She dove at the archive. Tim thought of tumblers. 

The archivist seemed to temporarily flicker out of solidity, and Nikola slammed headfirst into Martin’s broad chest.

“No,” Martin said, another denial that Tim felt in what could have once been called his bones. “Leave us alone.”

Tim had never seen Nikola Orsinov afraid. He had never had that chance, already near death in the Unknowing when what had been Jon Sims confronted her.

“We will grow stronger,” she hissed. “We will spread, and we will grow, and it will be a _glory_.” With one last wet noise, the ground sucked her down into itself.

“That… is not a problem I expected,” the archive said.

“You don’t need to talk,” Martin said, immediately at his side. “Unless you want to.”

“I believe I am safe for now,” the archive said. It smiled at Martin. “Tim,” it said. “I am sorry.” It did not look away from Martin.

Tim sighed. “Just… warn a guy next time you get off on getting choked, okay?”

The archive laughed awkwardly. “Noted.” It looked up, as though smelling something.

_Tasting the air_, Tim thought, and stifled a giggle, thinking of werewolf fanfiction.

_We are close to home._ The difference between its speaking voice and its projected voice was slight, Tim realized. He was no longer certain if he could physically hear, with this body, whether he was interpreting sound in some other way.

The difference probably did not matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for your patience! I have (let's not jinx it) a buffer now!


	10. Dead Bodies Go to Rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All together now (All together now) All together now (All together now)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1, 2, 3, 4  
Can I have a little more?  
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10   
I love you!

Tim sat himself on the ragged couch, looking at Basira—the detective—and let himself flop. He had no literal strings (he had checked), but he could still splay himself jointless, a pile of connected limbs and other things, to be disentangled when he felt like it.

“I didn’t think—” He considered his next words carefully, waiting for a joke that never came. He did not like all of the Hunters’ eyes focused on him. That gaze was different from the archive, predatory in a way that made his flesh tingle with phantom goosebumps. “The archive is just playing friendship Pokémon, isn’t it?”

He abruptly felt himself miss video games very badly. The city had electricity, somehow. Maybe he would find a working console. The apartment did have a television.

No one responded as though he had been trying to be funny. He was glad. It was easier to speak in terms of dead pop culture than to say _I am an undead doll. My old boss is looking for the ghost of a friend I don’t remember. Somehow, the apocalypse has a separate, interior, zombie apocalypse. _

Julia laughed. “One way to look at it,” she said. “Only one more.”

The archive and Martin had left soon after returning. Trevor had asked if Tim ate. Tim had said no. He was pretty sure he sustained himself a lot more metaphorically, something he didn’t need to think about.

“None of us remember Sasha,” Tim said, quietly.

“I do,” Melanie said. Tim noticed, in that moment, that she had taken a small knife from the kitchen and was picking at her left eye socket with the blade. “What?” She was sitting backwards on a rickety chair.

“What are you—?” He didn’t think to ask how she had noticed his gaze. He had, eventually, learned that _watching_ had a powerful effect on the watched, no matter what.

“Not letting it grow back,” Melanie said, as though she were picking at a wart on her fingers. “More importantly, I remember Sasha. Not well—I didn’t know her—but that was the thing’s game, yeah? Leave one person to remember, everyone else thinks she’s nuts.” She let out a soft whimper as she pulled a white substance that looked too solid to be part of an eyeball out of the socket.

“What do you remember?” Tim asked, softly.

“She was… nice. She seemed clever.” Melanie grinned as she switched what eye socket she was picking at. “Pretty, definitely.”

Tim winced, thinking about how all of his memories of sleeping with Sasha had been replaced by the thing that wasn’t her.

Georgie came out of the bedroom—Tim had a feeling he didn’t want to see where people who needed sleep slept—and yawned, her expression freezing as she saw Melanie and the knife.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice soft and easy. “If there’s a chance they’ll grow back…”

Melanie laughed. “Georgie,” she said, her voice filled with affection. Tim suddenly felt very uncomfortable. “I don’t want two knots of solid bone in my face, unless you promise to kiss them.”

Georgie pulled a face. “Fine,” she said. “I won’t argue.” She smiled, softly, and kissed Melanie on the nose. “I’m just worried you’re getting restless.”

“I am.” Melanie leaned on her girlfriend’s shoulder for a moment, before returning to her task. “But we won’t know where to go without a guide, and I can’t see my way to Jonah without the Eye.”

Tim snorted. Well, then, he thought. At least one person with the energy to want vengeance.

Melanie finished her eye-gouging and put the knife back into one of her many pockets. Georgie went back into the room. Catching a glimpse of it behind the door, Tim realized there were no lights. Did Georgie prefer it that way?

“It hurts,” Julia said, a statement and not a question.

“Of course, it hurts,” Melanie said. She pulled two marbles out of her pocket, one red, one black, and put them in the hollow sockets. “Everything hurts.” She grinned at Tim. “If you’re wondering, I can’t see you. I’m pretty sure I know who you are, though.”

Tim realized, slightly embarrassed, that he hadn’t really introduced himself. He hadn’t thought it necessary. He was aware of who Melanie was. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a doll.” There wasn’t really another way to explain it. “You seem pretty well adjusted to this whole situation.”

“I’ve had two weeks cooped up in this apartment,” Melanie said. “Enough time. Julia found me the marbles.” She smiled at the hunter. “I’m told they are for my two masters.” She laughed, softly. “If we pretend the divisions are so simple.”

“Two weeks?” Tim was less surprised than he expected.

“Time,” Julia said, and left it at that.

-

“Sasha?”

The archive’s voice echoed down the stone walls of the rotting mausoleum. Half the crypts were open, seeping dark fluid.

“What happened here?” Martin asked.

The archive coughed awkwardly.

“Oh!” Martin said. “Do you want to—” He fumbled with something in his hands and found he was holding a tape recorder. He smiled of it as though it were an extension of the archive, as though he were smiling at its many eyes. “Yes, then.”

The archive’s answering smile made Martin’s widen. “Here,” he said. The tape began to whirr as the archive took it in its hands.

-

Statement of Andreas Chekov, crypt keeper, about what has become of his mausoleum. Statement given by the Archive in situ. Statement begins.

Mausoleums do not smell like death. Their purpose is to be a clean, well-lighted place of mourning, where the bereaved may stand by their dead and think of them as they were in life, not as they are in their coffins, turning to dirt above ground.

They smell of bleach. They smell of light, and perhaps a touch of dust, of the gravedigger’s cologne and of wealth. They are small, they are large. They are public, they are private.

This mausoleum was public. It is now closed to new clients. It was mine. I did not own it, but I cared for it. I propped the lids of the sealed caskets, bore holes in the metal monsters unscrupulous funeral home proprietors sold to the wealthy who feared their dead loved ones more than they knew the science of decay. I placed shrouded, unembalmed bodies in simple caskets, to be retrieved when permission was granted to bury them in a back field, near a home. Somewhere dirty. Somewhere that was honest with death.

My greatest kindness to my clients was how quickly I allowed them to rot. While their living families allowed themselves their petty delusions, I gave them, the dead, their proper rest. We are so _afraid_ of rot, of slipping skin and foggy eyes. I see it in the eyes of the living. Not the fear—the mausoleum is not a place of fear—but the relief. They do not need to behold the dead. That is what I am—was—paid to do.

I do not know when the living ceased to come, when the dead began to line themselves up in orderly rows in my crypts. They were more polite than the living, less demanding. I am not old, but my sense of time has always been loose. Perhaps it has been a day since the first corpse smiled at me with rotting lips and said they were glad for the rest. Perhaps it has been years. I do not know. This is not my purpose.

You ask me: Why is there rot on the floor? Why do these halls smell of death, not of bleach? Why does dark liquid seep where there was once drainage? I say, this is a place of freedom. The living are no longer matter. The dead may rot as they will, where they will, free of fear. Free of the corrupting purity of bleach. Only the living need fear rot, in this new world.

-

“That…” The archive coughed. “That was shorter than anticipated.” It shoved the tape recorder into its pocket, not bothering to turn it off.

It knelt and poked at one of the puddles of human sludge with an over-articulated finger.

_She is here_, it declared.

“One of the bodies?” Martin asked. That thought, he realized, was one of the few things that could still frighten him in a functional way.

_No. She is_… It frowned. _A poltergeist? _

“It’s tough to reanimate a body that ceased to exist!” A crypt door slammed open, spilling more dark liquid, and a brightly-colored blur sped into the opposite wall. “Tough to stich back together a self that had been usurped. Hello, Jon.”

The thing that was emphatically Sasha James smiled at the two of them, mouth crammed with broad teeth that shrank to a human size and number after the archive stared at them for a moment. Its body was a patch-work of skin types, the hair on its head a bizarre carnival of bright colors and textures. It wore motley, like a jester would have, but not a deliberate motley.

“Why… why the Buried?” Martin asked.

“I wanted to see if I could rest, here, like the others. I can’t. Seems you need a human body to rot in a mausoleum. You would understand.” She addressed this last part to the archive. She stretched, and for a terrifying moment Martin thought about Helen. “I woke up in Artifact Storage. Left, of course, as quickly as I could. It was easy enough. Elias was… away.”

Martin started. “He was _what_?” He turned to the archive. It shrugged.

_I can’t exactly look at myself, Martin, unless you can find me a really big mirror. I don’t know much about Elias’s movement._

“Well,” Martin said. “That’s concerning. But, Sasha,” he looked down at his feet. “I don’t remember you.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” she said. “You will, eventually. Perhaps that will even help me keep one face.”

There was one more implication to what she said, that made some pieces start clicking together in Martin’s head. “You came out where you were—”

“Ripped violently out of reality and replaced by a thing which fed on the fact that everyone I had ever loved forgot me? Yes, I did. It was disconcerting. Did you know all the artifacts are still there? It’s very polite of them.”

Would that apply to everyone else? It wasn’t as though _everyone_ was coming back, or else Martin was fairly certain the archive would have told him his mum had returned from the dead.

“Archive,” Martin said, very carefully. “Are Jurgen and Gertrude…?”

The archive nodded. _You never asked, and they are less important than my assistants._ The “obviously” went unspoken, but Martin could feel it, like the end of a headache.

“Oh.”

“I will return with you,” Sasha said. “I don’t know if I will live with you.”

“That’s… fair,” Martin said. “The whole apartment building is empty, now. So it shouldn’t matter.”

She smiled. “Good to know. Is everyone else there?”

Martin nodded. “You’re the last. And there are… new faces.”

Sasha laughed, and Martin hoped that he was not just tricking himself into thinking the sound was familiar.


	11. Closer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter adjusts (a little) to being back and meets an ancestor.

Peter lay face up on the carpet, like a petulant beached whale or betrayed sack of flour.

“You should gloat more,” he said. “Your pet blew up the world, and now you will never die, and so on.”

Elias was reading a well-loved copy of _Wuthering Heights_. “I am gloating,” he said. “I’m looking at you.”

Peter sighed. “Why did you bring me back?”

“Sex,” Elias said.

Peter grunted. “Not terribly interested, thanks.” He would be, later, but sex was one of those things that involved a whole lot of physically having a body. Elias was being polite, and giving him an adjustment period, and it was making him suspicious.

“Oh, I didn’t mean with _you_.” He smiled. “I want you to make Martin uncomfortable, that’s all.”

Peter covered his smile with his fist. “You always know how to make me feel better, damn you.”

Elias finally put his book down. “You know, I don’t think anything _can_.”

Peter started. “What?”

“Damn me,” Elias said. He was smiling at Peter. “I don’t think anything can, except perhaps my archive if it’s very angry at me.”

Peter sighed. “That’s… of course you went there.” He looked at Elias some more. “You own the world, and you’re reading a book?”

“It’s a good book.” He looked at the cover. “I always preferred Romance to horror. The sublime, and all that, and I have no interested in being personally frightened. There is something to being swept—”

He blanched so abruptly that it made Peter scramble to his feet. “What?” he asked. “What could possibly worry you?”

Elias did not answer him until he had gently replaced the book, his body taught with barely held back tension.

“The End is not pleased with what we have done. I had not, until this moment, fully thought through the consequences of its… rebellion.”

“What do you mean?” The day (as though there were days) an Avatar of the Eye was straightforward with Peter would be the day he ceased to exist. Again.

Elias frowned. “How much do you know about your great-grandfather, Peter?”

-

“What now?”

Sasha had left again, after Melanie confirmed that was (more or less) the voice she remembered and everyone settled down for the ‘night.’

_Wait. I think. I can’t look at Elias, but we can always explore. _The archive frowned. _There is the problem of Nicola. _

“She seems like a bigger problem than just herself.”

The archive shifted so that its head rested against the inside of Martin’s knee.

“You have to sit up a bit if I’m going to braid your hair,” Martin said. The archive made a high chirping noise and moved, its now much-longer hair cascading down its shoulders. Hair grew, wounds healed, and corpses decayed: indications that something like time passed, even if time itself had gone utterly strange.

The archive made a disgruntled purring sound.

_Find the source of the Corruption. Might take a while. Remember Arkham? _

“Only a little.”

_Is he out of the hole in the ground? I don’t know. It seems I _can’t_ know, for now. But he’s pleased, and I don’t want him to be pleased_.

“Do you think Elias wanted this?”

_Absolutely not_. The archive stood abruptly. _There are other worlds, Martin, and I would not trade this one for any of them, but I think Elias would. He wanted to live forever and gaze out over a world of terror, but instead these fears are a little too anthropomorphized to function. It’s strange…_ It did that thing where it cocked its head to one side while thinking. The archive, having been Jon, had similar mannerisms, but more exaggerated. Cuter, even. Martin had an idea that it ran colder now, now porcelain left outside, but unfortunately, he had lost the knack for judging temperature. _Would you trade Basira’s life to guarantee that Peter Lukas was never coming back?_

Martin looked up at it. “No,” he said, thinking of the detective, likely curled up under Daisy, an eye peeled to keep watch for the hunters.

_What about Tim_?

Tim was resting in a corner, looking for all the world like a puppet with its limbs tangled together.

“Absolutely not!” Martin said. “What are you talking about?”

_The other option, other than this. What the world could be_.

Martin shook his head. “I already told you,” he said. “This world is beautiful.” He stood up himself, and pulled the archive against his chest, resting his head on top of its head. “You’re beautiful.”

The archive blushed as well as a thing that possibly no longer had blood could.

“How do we deal with the zombie problem?”

_Make sure no one’s ever afraid of zombies again_.

“That’s not going to happen, especially not now.”

The archive huffed out a laugh. _Find Arkham. Find the source of it. Kill the ones that come after us_.

They settled back down as they had been, with Martin’s fingers in the archive’s hair. “I don’t think I’d care about the zombies if they weren’t coming after us,” Martin said.

_Of course not. We matter to you. Everything else is just food_.

Martin parted a lock of hair into three. The braids weren’t terribly organized, but it was more to give the archive that pressure on its scalp than to do something aesthetically coherent. “You can hear them?”

_And see them. _The archive peaked up at him. _I wish I was Elias. Then, maybe, I could show you_.

-

The Edwardian burial ground had survived the great change mostly intact, though now there were a few more warped vaults.

“He’s _here_?” Elias asked. “Why not in the family crypt?” He had been… he had gone to the man’s funeral! Not wearing Jonah Magnus’s face, of course, but he had endured all the little Lukases all grown up, only to find out now, after the end of everything, that he had been tricked.

Peter shrugged. “He wanted to be alone,” he said. “Being buried in the crypt meant he’d someday have to share space with his children.” A brief smile crossed his face. “We don’t bury ourselves in earth. That’s… too close.”

The private mausoleum in question had a lighthouse carved on the now-open door.

Elias laughed.

“What?”

“No one who believed in the resurrection was revived from this particular bit of land. I would be amused if I wasn’t terrified.” He said the last part blandly.

“Did you hate my great-grandfather that much?” Peter looked at the lighthouse, feeling an echo of the hollow comfort he had once felt before his first death. Despite the changed world, his own small god was out there, quiet and looking away from him, always just out of reach. The eye, with its own unblinking gaze, would never quite drown out that feeling of being deliberately ignored. He smiled.

Elias shook his head. “We—”

“Ah, Jonah!”

Mordechai Lukas was only slightly shorter than Peter and would have been positively gigantic when compared to his peers. He certainly towered over Elias, who looked up at him with a peevish expression that fit a much younger face.

“I see my great-grandson has execrable taste. You finally won, didn’t you? I suppose I must give you my congratulations, though I suppose our old methods of celebration would no longer be appropriate.” He winked at Peter.

“Excuse me?”

“This body is called _Elias_,” Elias said. He glared at the other Lukas. “What do you want? And why are you _here_, I thought you’d be off to Moreland as soon as you woke up.”

“Mm,” the old man said. “That place is positively swarming with my family and their victims, I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.” His eyes refused to fix on either Peter or Elias, even as a show of dominance. “Aren’t you glad you met me first, _Elias_? There are others from our little reading circle who would be far from thrilled to see you, much less at their own return.” His smile turned vicious. “Poor Dr. Fanshawe, faithful to the last and yet this is not quite a judgement day.”

“Your master is perfectly content in this world,” Elias said. He was standing as though he expected to lean against a cane, as though he was much shorter. “You don’t need to bother me.”

Mordechai sat down heavily in front of his own name. “Is it not enough to want to check up on an old friend? There’s been trouble brewing while your eyes have been elsewhere, my boy. The End may have vomited us all back, but the other discontented old ones have their own little rebellions.” His gaze flicked momentarily to Peter, before sliding away again. “What great gifts you have been given.”

Elias’s eyes widened. Frightened, again. Before, Peter would have reveled in anything that could scare _Elias Bouchard_ of all things, but now that only made him worried. Here was the master of this new world, so distracted by…

Peter looked down at his feet, his skin crawling pleasantly. Had Elias really been so focused on him that he had allowed something to _grow_ right under his nose? Delightful. Troubling, also, but mostly delightful.

“If I were you,” Mordechai said, amiably, “I found find your eyes again, and solve your little rot problem.”

“And you?”

“I’m taking a nap. See you soon!”

Mordechai seemed to fade, until he was a sort of statue of himself.

“Time to face my murderer?” Peter asked, grimly.

“Yes,” Elias said, indulgently. “I’m very proud of him.”

-

The archive sat up suddenly, every altered nerve in its body taught with anxious anticipation. “Peter,” it said.

“Where?” Martin, to his frequent astonishment, could still feel groggy in those moments immediately after sleep, and had to blink what was hopefully still just crud out of his eyes before he had fully processed what his beloved had said. He then processed that it had actually _said_ the name, instead of merely projecting it non-verbally.

“Not here,” the archive said. It was talking through its left eye, mouth shut in a tight frown. “Looking for us. Elias finally noticed… the monsters.”

“Ah.”

Another reunion, then.

Fun.


	12. Gathering Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something is on the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a little weird, a little all over the place, but basically I decided I was making everything a little too wholesome!
> 
> TW: Gore

“You know I want to kill him,” Julia said, once Martin had explained everything. The archive had grown tired of speech, and was curled up with its head in his lap. “I can’t imagine it will _fix_ anything, but it’ll make me feel good.”

“I don’t know if you can.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t _try_.” She looked reasonably unshakeable. “He ruined everything.”

“He’s why you have all the prey you could ever want.”

“No, that’s _its_ doing. He was the… facilitator.” She frowned. “We’ve already told you this apocalypse isn’t quite _right_.”

A common refrain, that. Martin squashed the instinct to defend the archive; whatever errors there were in this new world weren’t its fault. It had been perfect. But it was inhuman, not infallible, and Martin wasn’t sure if it would want him to have Anglican-flavored faith in its abilities.

_I won’t let you_. This was one of those days where the archive moved and held itself more like it had when it was Jonathan Sims, but it still did not speak.

“You won’t let me kill him,” Julia said, blithely. She was, more than Georgie, not afraid of the archivist. “That’s when you’ll stop me.”

_None of us can know the future_.

-

Tim found Sasha in the basement of the apartment complex. At some point between the great change and the departure of the remaining human inhabitants, it had expanded beyond its original walls into an expanse of exposed pipes and (Tim was told) damp smelling air.

He was sure she heard him coming. His feet, which were make of flesh, made hollow sounds where they impacted the bare concrete floor.

She was standing in all her amalgamation under a dripping pipe, letting water fall a drop at a time onto her face. She was not blinking and did not show any outward reaction to Tim’s approach.

“Are you afraid of infection?” she asked, turning towards him. The sudden movement scattered water droplets, like a dog drying off.

They had been close, once. “I don’t know,” Tim said. “I don’t know how I can have feelings without a brain.”

“Do you need them?” Sasha asked. “I have feelings without an _I_, but I’m not exactly the common man.” She smiled, her patchwork skin splitting with the expression.

“I don’t know!” He thought about the archive, more or less contented. “I don’t understand anything, and I’m _afraid_, except maybe I’m not. I’m sure there are rules, here, but I can’t see them.”

“I understand,” Sasha said. “You couldn’t see gravity either.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Why are you down here.”

“I’m hunting.” In two abrupt motions she opened the door behind her, and a pale-lipped human stumbled through. “Care to watch?”

The human looked absolutely terrified, but worse, it looked confused, casting its vague gaze around in a desperate search for someone it could recognize. When its eyes landed on Tim, there was a moment of almost-relief before it really looked at him. It yelped, like a kicked dog, and slammed itself back into the door.

Tim rubbed at where his stomach would have been without thinking about what he was doing very much. “Huh,” he said. “Does he remember who he is?”

Sasha shrugged. “When he feels like it. I’m not interested in replacing anyone, not after all the trouble of cobbling a self together, but that doesn’t mean that they need ones.” The door had disappeared. “I’m not like Helen. I’m less easily directed.”

“We haven’t met her yet,” Tim said. “Is she okay?”

Sasha shrugged again. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll meet her eventually. The world is converging on this place.”

-

Adelard Dekker woke up and watched most of his arm slough off in lines of bubbling fat, blood and dark skin and muscle fiber all turned to liquid around his bone. Rubbing at his face with a recently skeletonized hand, he looked around the abandoned house where he had let himself die. It was still the same, all of these years later, except…

He looked at the floor, which was no longer streaked with blood, and out the window, which showed a brilliant eye where the sky should have been.

No man had ever been more acutely aware of his failure, he thought. Gertrude was almost definitely dead, and he allowed himself a brief moment of mourning, before forcing himself to his feet. He was now virtually half-skeleton, but he was thinking, and he could see his heart beating regularly under the left side of his ribs, and that was far more disconcerting than what he assumed was the remains of the disease that killed him.

If he was back from the dead, then odds were there was a certain person-shaped disease vector that he’d died trying to stop was also back. The world could wait. This particular corner of it could not.

-

Jurgen Leitner had never healed from a head wound this bad before. Even when he’d been beaten up by that goth kid, it had never been this bad.

Of course, he thought, as he felt his skin reknit itself, he’d never been skinned before, either.

He remembered that, though he was absolutely certain he had not experienced it at the time. The circus people, their leering, plastic smiles looking down at him, with their sharpened fingers and scalpels and tanning agents. His skin had become the last thing alive about him, startled and in pain.

The Unknowing was, despite its name, something else that he remembered.

Perhaps he should have expected Elias would kill him. Jonah Magnus was predictable up until the moment he panicked, at which point he became a little boy in a dark green dress trying to wash the blood out of his pig tails.

Jurgen blinked. Now how did he know that little piece of trivia?

“It doesn’t know what to make of you,” a familiar voice said behind him. “It would make you eye, seeing what killed you, but then the Stranger interfered.” Gertrude Robinson’s voice was the same as it had always been, but now her hair was a violent, fire red, and she looked both younger and like she was trying to figure out how to un-melt herself. “At least you never bound yourself to a Desolation girl.” She spread her hands, in explanation mode. “That’s why we’re here. In the room where he killed us.”

“You’re talking in capital letters,” Jurgen said, badly disguising his sheer confused relief at seeing her.

“The Eye making itself so very _specific_ has driven the other powers into something like cohesion, and now one man’s understanding of Smirke’s 14 has been imposed upon the new world,” she said. “That we are speaking to each other means I failed.”

“Yes,” Jurgen said. He couldn’t quite care about that. He just wanted out of the Archives, out of this office in particular. He could feel a gaze on the back of his neck, but he had no idea who exactly was on the other side of the optic nerve. “Yes, you did. Did you know that—” he stopped himself mid-sentence. “Oh no.” His mind was vast and unknowable before him, the vaults of his memories filled with even more knowledge he had in no way acquired. “Oh no, oh no, oh—” He stumbled, and it was only Gertrude’s firm grasp on his arms that kept him from toppling over completely. “There’s so much.” He knew his voice was weak, all of a sudden, but he couldn’t care.

“Oh,” Gertrude said, a hollow echo. “Oh, my. Every last one?”

Jurgen nodded his head. “There’s so many. I collected so many, and even…” Was he weeping? “Even the ones I burned. They’re all here. Why are they all here, Gertrude? You were the Archivist, shouldn’t—”

“I am not the Archivist, anymore,” Gertrude said. “I think this is something’s idea of a joke.”

-

“I still can’t believe you let a zombie apocalypse take over your apocalypse,” Peter said, testily. He had been on edge since Mordechai’s appearance, and the occasional half-rotted avatar attacking yet another hapless victim was getting annoying. He needed to find a patch of Lonely, somewhere, see that he had not been completely hollowed from his god.

Elias frowned. “I was busy,” he said. “Looking for _you_, I might add.”

“I didn’t need looking for!” he growled. “I was fine just where I was.”

“Well I wasn’t,” Elias said. “We weren’t.” He crossed his arms. “You are important, and you don’t belong to yourself, and… oh fuck you,” he said, and grabbed his occasional husband by the shoulders to kiss him. He had to, just as he had when he was James Wright and Peter was very young, stand on his toes to do it, but it was worth the look of shock on Peter’s face.

“Why are we bothering with your archivist, anyway?” Peter asked. “You should be gloating more. Your world is your oyster, but the only thing you’re gloating over is _me_.”

“As you said,” Elias said, sounding deeply embarrassed for the moment. “I let a zombie apocalypse happen when I wasn’t looking. It seems you were right, and now I have to deal with the consequences.”

-

The archive returned from an excursion alone to find Basira’s hand wrapped around Daisy’s throat. It was not foreplay and making itself small and vulnerable was not going to fix this one.

Rubbing at its eyes, the bit of the Watcher that looked like a human man coughed, and said, in a voice hoarse from strange use, “We’re all bad people. I can feed you your old victims if you like.”

Both women snarled at it, for different reasons, but Basira froze. “This apartment is too small,” she said, carefully.

“Yes,” it said. “And this is a city of the eye. There are other rooms, other buildings, but…” It looked at Martin. “There will be more changes, as we deal with what is coming. You finally saw the monster, didn’t you?” it asked Basira with a small smile. “Did you expect it to be more obvious?”

“Yes,” Basira said. “Why even both asking when you already know?” She let go of Daisy’s throat, who whined in a very human way. She was only a wolf when it was the right time to be a wolf, and her growls were all from her own throat.

“Curtesy.”

“And since when do you speak?” Daisy growled.

“Since I realized something,” it said. “I can see everything, and I don’t have to be _polite_ about it.” It smiled. “Now,” it said, rubbing its hands together, gaze flicking from everyone it had gathered, all its old friends who had hurt it very badly. “We will be having guests soon. Shall we hunt?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter the tentacle tag finally happens.


End file.
